BACK TO LIVING IN THE MOMENT

Living in the moment, being HERE rather than THERE, is a miraculous thing. I am discovering that, when I am HERE, I am at peace. And when I am at peace, life falls into place without my having to push or pull or force things into position. Life falls into place when I let go of needing to know why or how or when- when I trust that there is something much bigger than me running the show. Life falls into place when I let go of every thing I think I know- when I stop and still the chatter in my mind. Life falls into place when I am still enough to listen, when I can hear the truth.

My son is six-years-old and we just finished cleaning and rearranging his room. We needed to get rid of his rug. His allergies were acting up. He was having difficulty breathing. So, together as a family, we undertook the project. We cleaned and decluttered and reorganized his space.
We worked hard to make the transformation happen. It was a major undertaking-a process that took much longer than expected. But I knew that tearing out the rug to reveal the hard wood floor underneath held much deeper significance than what was happening on a physical level. I knew that it meant something more. And with this awareness, I was able to be much more patient than usual. I was able to be PRESENT to the process that was unfolding around me.

The transformation happened in stages. First, furniture had to be moved out of his room and into our very tiny hallway.The bed had to be dismantled, and a desk had to be taken apart before we could carry it out the door.Then there was the process of ripping out the old rug. We had to pull it away from the wall, remove the nails that once held it in place and carry it to the road. From there, we had to remove fifteen years worth of dust that had accumulated beneath it so we could wash the floor. Then , once we washed the floor,we had to wait for it to dry before we could move everything back in…

What I thought would take a few hours, ended up taking up an entire Saturday afternoon. Cleaning and decluttering and reorganizing my son’s room took a great deal of time and energy. But, eventually, it happened; we made it happen. In stages, a little at a time, we got rid of the things that had compromised his breathing.

Being present to this experience made me appreciate the transformation process-the processes within the process itself: moving out the old to make room for the new- cleaning, clearing, and rearranging–the letting go of “old things” that compromise our breathing.

Being present to this experience made me aware, that the transformation that was happening around me, was also happening within me.